Projects whose very nature requires the involvement of government experts while simultaneously engaging politicians also involve higher risks of self-inflicted vulnerability. When self-management remains insufficient and boundary spanning across multiple jurisdictions is weak or absent, the influence of political actors, who inevitably lack ‘system knowledge’ and can ‘afford not to learn’, can easily be counterproductive. This is what the case of the German Reform of money laundering prevention of 2017 illustrates. What was intended as an improvement of law enforcement resulted in administrative disaster with the consequence of tens of thousands of cases of suspected money-laundering remaining unprocessed among which thousands of cases of financing terrorism. The case analysis underlines the relevance of a common understanding of a project’s mission among the stakeholders plus a communication strategy that stimulates the spirit of a common cause. Achieving stakeholder consensus in public sector projects is particularly challenging, however, due to the potential incompatibility between the rationale of politicians seeking to secure constituency support and that of experts striving to maintain their professional identity and standing. Which implies that one fundamental challenge of public sector project management is that the will of political actors to disregard existing expert knowledge is as unpredictable as their ability to get away with it through skillful communication.